Sara Branham

Sara Elizabeth Branham Matthews (1888–1962) was an American microbiologist and physician best known for her research into the isolation and treatment of Neisseria meningitidis, a causative organism of meningitis.

Biography Branham was born July 25, 1888, in Oxford, Georgia to mother Sarah ("Sallie") Stone and father Junius Branham. Although education of women was not commonplace at the time, members of Sara Branham's family were firm believers in the value of education for women. Following in the footsteps of her mother (Amanda Stone Branham, 1885 graduate) and grandmother (Elizabeth Flournoy Stone, 1840 graduate), She was a member of Alpha Delta Pi. With few professional opportunities offered to women with an education then, she became a schoolteacher, working for ten years in Georgia's public school system in Sparta, Decatur, and finally at Atlanta's Girls' High School.

In 1927, Branham left Chicago and began working as an associate at the University of Rochester School of Medicine under Stanhope Bayne-Jones. and died November 16, 1962 She studied the toxins produced by Shigella dysenteriae. The new name was officially accepted in the 1974 edition of Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology,

Branham's studies in infectious disease were nationally known, and she came to be considered as one of the "grand ladies of microbiology". In a biographical article about Branham published in the Atlanta Constitution, the huge impact of her work was summarized in the exclamation: "She killed millions of killers!"